The roof of the Heywood brake van has been perhaps the most involved part of the project. The kit parts included only the main frame, I've no idea what was supplied with the kit originally for the main piece. The scrapbox revealed some 20 thou black styrene that I had already curved over a drinks can some time ago, and there was sufficient material to do the job twice, which turned out to be useful...
I had decided that the roof should be removable during the painting stages and as the frame piece really just balanced on the four pillars, I wanted some way of locating it at the final assembly stage. I opted to use some 3 x 1mm lengths of nickel silver etch fret attached to the inside of the pillars to achieve this, attached in place with superglue, 2mm on the pillar and 1mm above for the frame to locate to.
Corresponding strips of styrene on the inside edge of the roof locate it correctly fore and aft. The roof is the aforementioned styrene, which was glued to the frame with epoxy adhesive and clamped together until dry, helping to bring the material to the correct shape as it was a slightly tighter radius. When set it was trimmed to shape but the first attempt looked awful so it all came off for a fresh try with the remainder of the material. This was the result, and compared to the drawing that had kindly been provided by David John of 'Rhyd' fame, it looked wrong...
The drawing, and re-inspection of photos, revealed that the roof frame should be wider than the sides of the vehicle, so I set about widening the roof. Had I not used the rest of the black styrene I might have started over again, but I set out to recover what was there. 40 x 60 thou styrene strips were added either side of the frame and once the glue was set they were sanded to be vertical with the vehicle sides. This reduction in width was sufficient to allow 15 x 30 thou strips to be added as extensions of the roof giving a neat overhang. The ends were treated to 15 x 20 thou strips to create a more consistent overhang once sanded gently back once the glue was dry. Milliput was used to fill all gaps and once sanded smooth the new roofline is shown below.
As an extra stage the roof has subsequently been sprayed with filler primer and smoothed out again to ensure there are no tell-tale marks for the joins.
A good clean-up and the paintshop beckons!
Colin
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